Customers often prefer to purchase food products in packages containing a specific number of the food products. For example, a pizza meal package may contain a specified number of palm-size pizza crusts. During the packaging process, the pizza crusts are typically grouped into the desired number of pizza crusts for each package (such as three) and placed in each package manually by hand. Such a manual process is time consuming and costly compared to an automatic process.
Many of these counted food products such as the pizza crusts, however, are thin and pliable. Additionally, the manufacturing process is such that each crust is a slightly different size and has an exterior with adherent properties. These features make it extremely difficult to provide an automated system that aligns the crusts so they can be automatically divided into groups with a specified number of crusts, and then placed into packages. For instance, when too much pressure is applied to a stack of the crusts, the crusts may stick together so that attempting to remove one crust from the stack may destroy the crust and/or adjacent crusts. Also, the crusts may pop out of alignment when a stack of the crusts are being conveyed through a turn or bend on the system. In this case, the forward momentum of the crust may cause the crust to veer or jump away from the new desired course on the downstream part of the turn. Therefore, what is desired is a system that stacks the crusts, singulates the crusts for placement into groups of crusts of a specified number, and dispenses the groups of crusts into packages while avoiding the problems mentioned above.